Springfield, Ohio, Was The Prototype

One of the unfortunate limitations with covering the news day-to-day in a newsletter is that, for these issues to be satisfying for the reader, I kind of have to answer the question of “what does this all mean” before we really know. Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don’t. And, honestly, I tend to find it more interesting when I don’t.

One story from the last few years that’s been kicking around my head recently was the right-wing moral panic about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, back in 2024. And after reading my issues back during that news cycle, I was surprised at how quick I was to dismiss it. I was really buzzing from Brat Summer, I guess.

“One of the most interesting things about this election is how limp right-wing disinformation has felt,” I wrote like a big dumb stupid idiot at the time. “The biggest op of the summer was the racist swarm around Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and even with a big debate night signal boost from former President Donald Trump, it still never really reached the point where it felt like real people actually believed it. Nor did it ever fully connect back to the election.” No, Ryan!!! No!!!!

Anyways, I was wrong. Springfield wasn’t some right-wing misadventure. It was a test drive of what the Trump administration has now deployed in Minneapolis and will be, assuredly, coming to a city near you soon. And, also, probably Venezuela, Mexico, Greenland, and, apparently, Alberta, Canada. A dizzying mix of propaganda, misinformation, and brutal state violence that moves at the speed of the internet, almost always predicated on some kind of viral lie.

And we’ve now learned that there is really no off switch. The administration is institutionally incapable of admitting its wrong. And it is not above adding more lies to the pile to save face. Perhaps that’s why Springfield, Ohio, felt so “limp” to me back in 2024. They learned that it cannot work without full commitment and without complete dedication to their own insanity. And this week they crossed a line that, one would think, no functioning democracy can recover from.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, a lawyer and activist from Minneapolis, was arrested this week after she helped organize a protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul, which has a pastor that is also an Immigration and Customs official. According to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Armstrong and three others “coordinated” an “attack” on the parish and said they violated 18 U.S. Code § 241, which forbids the threatening or intimidation of anyone enjoying “any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States."

And then the official White House X account posted an AI-altered photo of Armstrong crying as she was perp-walked. You can see the real photo compared to the altered one below.

“This is, to my knowledge, the first instance of an official social media account representing the government of a democratic nation intentionally spreading altered imagery maliciously targeting one of its own citizens,” Dr. Caroline Orr Bueno, a disinformation researcher, wrote on X this week. It is also likely a crime! As another X user pointed out.

White House spokesperson Kaelan Dorr, a member of Trump’s digital team we’ve covered before, released a statement on X on Thursday, declaring, “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”

Which is, of course, deeply embarrassing, but also a fascinating example of how misused the word “meme” has become, and about as concise a definition of Trumpism as we’re likely to get. The enforcement of their power is equal to their desire to drown out the voices of others online.

In case you’re still foggy on how this ideology is playing out in the various conference rooms that run the federal government, 45 FBI employees spoke to The New York Times for a bombshell investigation into Director Kash Patel’s first year at the agency. It’s a harrowing read, but one passage, recounting the moments after Charlie Kirk was murdered is especially frightening to read.

“[Patel] and Bongino start talking about their Twitter strategy,” a senior executive said. “And Kash is like: I’m gonna tweet this. Salt Lake, you tweet that. Dan, you come in with this. Then I’ll come back with this. They’re literally scripting out their social media, not talking about how we’re going to respond or resources or the situation. He’s screaming that he wants to put stuff out, but it’s not even vetted yet. It’s not even accurate.”

Which makes sense. It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate. It doesn’t matter if anything even really happens in real life, for the most part. All that matters is that people on the internet see it and think it happened.

God Forbid An Otter Get A little Motion

OpenAI Is Trying To Make Money Now

ChatGPT is launching ads. This is a bad, no good idea. So much so that even Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at Davos this week that he thought he was a “knee-jerk” decision. If you want to read OpenAI’s thought process behind ads, they put up a post last week about it. They’re going to look exactly how you think. But advertising is not the only kooky idea that OpenAI is kicking around right now.

According to a report from The Information this week, OpenAI is also mulling over the idea of monetizing “AI-aided discoveries” made with their tools. Makes sense, every graphic designer has to pay Adobe a fee for what they make in Photoshop. Oh, wait, that’s a genuinely insane idea that no one in their right mind would ever agree to. And, after my disastrous week vibe coding, here are some very specific problems I see with this idea, in no particular order:

But most important of all, the whole thing reeks of desperation. Which is the one thing you can’t really be when your entire marketing strategy is predicated on developing a revolutionary technology that you’re confident is just right around the corner.

This Is What X Thinks The News Is

—by Adam Bumas

On Thursday, X launched a series of very Bluesky-style starter packs of accounts to follow. It’s honestly a throwback seeing major social platforms integrate popular features from smaller, buzzy platforms. We should be making X starter packs of our favorite Bossip writers in between rounds of PBR at The Scratcher.

Since this is X and this is 2026, the actual starter packs leave something to be desired. The “investigative journalism” starter pack includes stalwart muckrakers like  Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan. At least it doesn’t include Polymarket, which is posting lies on its official X account so regularly that Jeff Bezos had to become the Deboonker on Thursday.

But maybe X has a vested interest in deprioritizing the idea of truth and journalism. Last week, Suleiman Ghori an engineer at xAI said on a podcast that the company is flagrantly ignoring regulations to build its data centers and relying heavily on vibe-coding for many core tasks, even after losing access to Claude. X hasn’t publicly denied anything Ghori said, but he left the company on Monday. If only there was a quick and easy way to find an an investigative journalist who could dig into this.

Club Chalamet Is Switching Allegiances

Simone Cromer, better known as Club Chalamet, seems to be signaling that she is switching up the focus of her standom. She launched @storrietimes, an Instagram page dedicated to Connor Storrie from Heated Rivalry, this week. Thankfully, Instagram has already disabled the account. You can see screenshots on X of her deleted posts about it here, though.

I say “thankfully” because I find the entire Club Chalamet project genuinely uncomfortable. To the point where we don’t really cover her much here. And I was borderline horrified at the Wall Street Journal’s decision to do a big feature on her at the end of last year.

Maybe I’m no fun, but I’ve seen countless videos at this point of Cromer making Timothée Chalamet physically uncomfortable at events. What she is doing isn’t even journalistic, like, say, Pope Crave, the papal stan account that continues to be a useful source of information on the Catholic Church. But, also, I tend to think that most standom, at a certain level, is feudal serf behavior at best and stalking at worst.

The Braid Guy’s Having A Dilbert Crash Out

—by Adam Bumas

Just a week after the death of Scott Adams, it seems like you can kill the man, but not the idea. According to Bloomberg, pioneering game developer Jonathan Blow is having trouble with the dev team of his upcoming game, Order of the Sinking Star. Blow’s employees have a problem with his unwavering commitment to posting increasingly deranged pro-Trump, anti-vax, kids-these-days opinions on X and Twitch.

Blow helped define the indie video game, doing all the design and programming for his first release, Braid, in 2008. Decades later, the idea of a game that’s a singular, authorial creation is so powerful it’s warped the entire industry around it. Games are just too complex to make entirely solo, even with generative AI. Smaller dev teams have faced controversy for downplaying the work of contractors and external teams — not that larger developers are any better about that.

In an industry where the current state of the job market is “slightly less horrendous,” it’s already a labor issue if you’re working on a game that everyone treats as if it was entirely made by one man. It’s a bigger labor issue if that one man has struggled for years with chronic Poster’s Disease

The Kids Are Alright

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a real good vacation video.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***